Page 4 of Nightcrawler

Publisher: Self-published

Genre: MM mystery/detective/police procedural

Review/rating by Nightcrawler: 2 stars

Synopsis:

The story of a down-on-his-luck detective seeking revenge on the perpetrator who’d somehow managed to cut off his leg with a lawnmower at their first encounter. This injury leaves our central character with mobility issues which hamper his ability to bring the fiend to justice.

My Review:

I’ll begin my review with an actual quote from the book so you’ll get an idea of the level of reader engagement, far greater, I might add, than my own.

“Oh, yes, it was true that the detective in this story had two holes with which to breathe but, to my utter chagrin, when he took off his fedora, they were not located on the top of his head but were simply mere nostrils in his face.”

That’s right, dear readers, should you decide to pick up this 2-star book and actually take the time to readit, you will find that it doesn’t have a blowhole, though, it certainly blows chunks! Call me Ish…I’m in hell. With all of this book’s claims to be a novel about a detective named A. Tabb who’d lost his lower left leg after somehow ending up under the blades of a lawnmower the perpetrator was using as a weapon, all I can say is: PUH…LEEZE!

The lawnmower attack, though, not central to the mystery/police procedural angle to this story, is more interesting than the many ludicrous examples of A. Tabb using cabs and Ubers for his car chases as he tries to catch…yes, you guessed it…his white whale. When he finally catches up to his quarry, the man is dealt with quickly and almost bloodlessly…no great whale tales here.

In summary, without giving away spoilers, at the back of the book, the author has included a teaser for book two, called Old Can in the Sea. I can’t wait for that one…boy, it sounds riveting.

I’ll simply end this by clarifying my 2-star review of Mobile Dick explaining why it doesn’t earn a negative star review. I gave the book one star for plot, though, it had more holes than Swiss cheese, and one star for the disability angle which added interest to the story. I don’t mean for my words to sound glib here. Anyone dealing with a disability deserves all the respect we can give them. However, after reading this novel cover to cover, I would urge them not to use their Uber drivers or cabbies as stunt drivers.

I laughed as I logged out of my Nightcrawler account on Bestreads, proud of yet another review which would be readby an ever-expanding group of my avid followers. Ever since writing my reviews of terrible books after being horrified by the stuff some of these Indies called literature these days, I’d started gaining followers, clamoring for my thoughts. I didn’t think I was actually doing a disservice to the authors involved by highlighting their books in my reviews. Who was I to imagine being the one to move markets? Besides, the obscure books I reviewed would probably never get seen by John Q. Public if it weren’t for reviewers like me, one-stars notwithstanding.

I shoved my iPad into my duffel on the passenger seat of my truck before glancing around the empty street. I hoped I hadn’t missed anyone walking up to the intricately crafted and closed iron gates of the Encino mansion’s driveway on Hesby Avenue in the San Fernando Valley. I went wherever my recoveries from GMS Insurance took me but most of the time, that meant staying somewhere on the west side of L.A.

Grayson, Mallory, and Simms insured a variety of precious and extravagantly expensive objects and that’s what made a person in my line of work feel necessary. As far as explaining my contentment with my job, there was always something new, always a new scumbag to hunt, always a new object to retrieve on behalf of my employer.

It was still early, two hours before dawn, and it was warm and cozy inside my big, black, Dodge Ram 1500. The truck still smelled new but then again, it was the firstnewvehicle I’d ever purchased. After earning a nice commission—though, not as nice as the one I would have earned had I recovered the Mulberry diamond from Lyle Trench earlier this year—I’d simply walked into a showroom one day and written a check for the vehicle. I loved having the benefit of the limousine tint on its windows and the horsepower under its hood. The best partabout it was the high profile which allowed me to look down into the passenger seat of most cars and trucks driving beside me.

It was powerful to have that advantage over other drivers and just one more way I felt safe. Growing up on the vast Navajo Nation lands at the western most portion of the reservation not far from the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, keeping safe hadn’t always been easy. The rez was safe enough but the high school my mother had insisted I attend to learn the ways of the white man’s world after elementary, wasn’t easy.

There was bigotry everywhere, but white teens weren’t always welcoming to brown folks like me, especially with the Tea Party making noise where they’d camped out on Arizona’s southern border, even though there were sure enough of us around. I could pass for white, especially with the blue eyes I’d inherited from my half-Caucasian mother and a name like Robin which she called me. I hadn’t reclaimed my Native American name until I moved far away to California where a boy of barely nineteen could call himself whatever he wanted when starting over.

I reached over to the cup holder and plucked my steaming hot green tea from the console, bringing it to my mouth and once again glancing around. The quiet residential neighborhood where both the owner and the perpetrator lived was one of the richest in southern California, certainly on this side of the hill. Once you crossed over and dropped down into the Valley, leaving L.A. proper in the rearview, a wide network of cities spread out for twenty miles square. The sprawling San Fernando Valley consisted of everything from multi-million-dollar estates to seedy ghettos marred by gang graffiti.

The world-famous Universal Studios back lot as well as Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Studios where television and movies were brought to life was a part of the hub and bubof Valley life. It had sprung up around the movie industry a hundred years ago, carved out of orange groves and avocado farms. The movies they made here weren’t all Mickey Mouse or Marvel comics, though. In the 1970s, the Valley had the dubious reputation of being the place where over 90 percent of all pornography produced and distributed in the U.S. originated, earning the famous monikers ofSilicone Valleyand theSan Pornando Valley.

The only reason I knew so much about the Valley’s reputation was because I’d been doing a lot of research on it. I smiled, thinking about how I’d reacted when my assistant, Judy, had handed me a copy of the Paul Thomas Anderson film, Boogie Nights, and told me to do my research in preparation for this job. Apparently, the object I’d be recovering had close similarities to props used in the original film. My research revealed that the silicone penile prosthetic used by Mark Walberg in the film Boogie Nights is currently locked safely away in the actor’s safe. The film’s producers allowed him to keep the prop when they’d finished filming that final scene in the movie when Dirk Diggler unzipped his pants in front of a mirror to admire it.

I wondered whether the very large boob prosthetic I’d be retrieving from the thief who lived inside the house I was parked in front of, would be willing to part with it. The prop was insured by its owner with GMS to the tune of a cool quarter of a million bucks. According to my research, Gemma Monroe, arguably the queen of 1970’s porn, had the fake boobs fashioned by a French prosthetic maker to fit like a glove over her own rather large bosom and they’d literally launched her porn career into the stratosphere. She was also rumored to be the first female porn actress to shave a runway into her…I shuddered. The mere ideaof that part of female anatomy held absolutely no interest for me. Nor did giant boobs for that matter.

I was one of those gay men who could honestly say, I’d never taken a poke at any of my hags, not that there were a lot of those around. I didn’t count Judy Mendez in my description of hags and even though she was both my assistant at GMS and my best friend, I wouldn’t think of coming onto her. And if I’d dared call her a hag of any kind, she would have beaten my ass, and I would have deserved it.

Judy was thirty-six, married to a fantastic guy, and the mother of two young children, all of whom meant the world to her. Her husband Luis was a stay-at-home dad who cleaned the house, took wonderful care of their kids, Sofia and Rafi, and cooked amazing Mexican dinners from recipes passed on to him from his mother. He’d been happy to quit his job as a cable technician and stay home when he learned what Judy would be making when we’d moved from a smaller insurer to GMS.

Moreover, since leaving my family in Arizona ten years ago and going to work for a small bail bondsman in Van Nuys where Judy had been running the office, she and Luis had become more of a family to me than simply friends. I’d been there to witness their meeting, their marriage, and the birth of their children. Now, I ate over at their house at least two times a week, often helping out with Sofia and Rafi’s homework at the kitchen table while Luis and Judy laughed and shared kisses at the stove.

Some days, I watched them and longed for a partner who was as loving, with a relationship as strong as they had. Judy insisted I was a good man who needed a man of my own. At twenty-nine, I wasn’t sure that’d ever happen. As usual, the moment I began feeling like she was right, I put it out of my mind and turned my focus to the present and what I was supposed to be doing. Oh sure, every once in a while, I’d see a guy who did it forme in every way. I’d come into contact—literally—with one such guy outside the Capitol Records building about six months ago. Miguel Huerta was the epitome of a guy I could see myself with, minus the attitude of course.

I sighed, knowing he had no interest and picked up the file folder I’d brought with me and flipped it open, once again getting an eyeful of the large silicone prosthetic tits I was determined to recover from James Passantino. Gemma Monroe claimed Passantino—her former boyfriend—stole them from a safe she kept in her home while she was in the hospital for a short overnight stay. Though he didn’t live in her house, he did live in his own right next door. Monroe told GMS he had a housekey and passcodes to enter through her wrought iron gates that barred entry from the street.

James Passantino had developed some sort of pizza rolls—a recipe his Italian mother had perfected—and gone on to figure out how to produce them commercially. They were in every freezer section in every grocery store across America including all the big box stores out there. With distribution nationwide, Passantino’s pizza rolls and in fact, an entire line up of frozen Italian treats from breadsticks to gelato, had made him rich and very attractive to Gemma Monroe. She’d fallen in love with him shortly after he’d bought the Encino mansion and become her neighbor.

As Gemma tells it, when Passantino’s very Italian wife had left Italy and come to join her husband in the states, he’d literally been caught with his pants down. Catching him sunbathing nude with Gemma in his backyard hadn’t been the kind of reunion either James or Isabella had planned when she’d turned up. Gemma had no idea James was married and had ended the relationship that day. And even though James had filed fordivorce and begged Gemma to forgive him, Isabella had stayed on to make both of their lives miserable.

When Judy pulled up a long list of domestic complaints and LAPD calls out to the Passantino house since Isabella’s arrival in California, I’d been almost reluctant to take this job. I hated getting involved in domestic situations and avoided them at all costs. When Judy found a final divorce settlement in which Isabella agreed to take half of James’ net worth with a caveat that after receiving it, she’d be compelled to go back home to Italy and never return, I agreed to retrieve Gemma’s boobs. I looked at the two mansions, both hidden behind heavy, defensive gates and moss-covered walls, and then looked back down at the file.